


I Can See Now (Everything to Me)

by poisontaster



Series: Every Broken Thing [17]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: John-centric, M/M, Season/Series 01, Secret Relationship, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-20
Updated: 2006-10-20
Packaged: 2018-05-11 01:49:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5609329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisontaster/pseuds/poisontaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>5 signs that John ignored that told him his sons are in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Can See Now (Everything to Me)

**One.**

Frankly, John was surprised the boys held out for as long as they did, Dean between it and Sammy just like John always told him. Sammy's arms are around Dean's chest and he's shouting, "Don’t you do it, Dean. Don't go! Don't you leave me!"

The succubus is between him and his boys and John's got about a split second to see all this, see the way Dean's face is split wide open, slack with demon borne lust and the way Sammy's feet drag in the dust against his brother's pull.

One second and the succubus is between John and his boys.

It turns and, like thick perfume borne on a current of wind, he feels her glamour touch him, heat touching his belly and lower. She looks like Mary.

The specially blessed silver shot cost them every last penny they had plus John's two best knives but with his cock hardening in his pants, with his boys screaming, "No! _No!_ Don't do it, Dad, _please_!" John thinks it was worth every penny as it blasts that creeping, slinking Hellspawn back whence it came.

Dean is sobbing and Sam is sobbing, the two of them still locked together and fallen into the dirt. That one glimpse of her—illusion and stinking lie that it was—cut deep and John may be sobbing a bit too as he goes to his knees and pulls his boys to him.

"It wasn't her," he murmurs to them, to himself, heart beating too fast at the thought of how close he came to losing them, losing them both. "It wasn't her. It wasn't her."

Dean's face is buried in Sammy's neck and his shoulders shake. Sammy's skinny arms are around Dean protectively, his face hidden by Dean's shoulder and his own hair.

"It wasn't her," John says again.

**Two.**

John knows that Dean's kind of a tomcat.

Hard to miss, living like they do and with a steady parade of slightly (or very) airheaded but always very pretty girls that moon around every time they're out and about. And though part of him aches at the sight of them, half-wishing Dean had the time and opportunity to find himself a _real_ girl instead of just one who'll let him in her pants, he is mostly relieved. Hunting's a high-tension field and they all have seen their share of hunters with deep ongoing chemical romances, whether it's booze or blow. Of their options for stress relief, Dean being a bit of a slut doesn't hardly ping his radar.

Sammy, on the other hand, is an entirely different story.

Or, at least, he finds it a lot more shocking to come around the corner of the motel in search of the boys only to find Sammy—little Sammy—getting his dick sucked. Jesus, kid can't be more than thirteen years old and John is torn between a paternal _Atta boy, Sammy!_ and slight horror at how fast they're growing up.

He can't see the girl; the patch of scrubby hedge that runs along the motel's back wall hides all of Sam's lower body— _thank God_ —but John doesn't need to see the details to recognize that pose, shoulders flat to the wall and torso pushed out, the slack lazy-lidded expression, the way the arms arc out to your partner's head whether to hold or fuck deeper. Sam's face looks strangely, hurtfully adult—glazed and open-mouthed, looking down at whoever it is—which makes it just that much weirder to hear, "Yeah. Uh…oh, oh, God, like that, like that, please…" in his breathy, unbroken voice.

 _Sam's getting his dick sucked_ , John thinks again, wondering, and that's enough to break him out of his tharn trance. "Sam Winchester!" he barks. He has to admit, the father in him takes a certain perverse glee in watching Sam nearly jump out of his skin as well as the sudden, startled and frantic rustling of the bushes.

"D…Dad?" Sammy squeaks. "I…uh… I can explain!"

"Oh, I think I got it loud and clear, Sam. But right now I need you to help me find your brother. It's dinner time and I'm starving. You can," he pauses significantly, another perk of fatherhood, " _hang out_ with your little girlfriend later. Somewhere else."

"Um." Sam still looks sort of poleaxed, slightly hunched into the thin protection of the leaves.

"Now, Sam," John says and Sam nods hastily.

"Yessir."

John turns on his heel to give Sam and his girl time to pull themselves together—he's not an ogre after all—and from the corner of his eye, he watches Sammy collapse limply against the motel's stucco, both hands over his mouth as if to stifle hysterical giggles.

John sighs. He guesses it is about that time. He just forgets these niceties sometimes.

"I want you to have a talk with your brother," he tells Dean over dinner, when Sam gets up to hit the head.

Dean chokes a little. He's been oddly quiet all night, applying himself to his fried chicken, corn and biscuits with a most un-Deanlike attention. "About what?" he asks, not meeting John's eyes as he sops up the last of his biscuit gravy.

" _The_ talk, Dean. And the rules." Because they have to have rules:

_Always use condoms; don't listen to their bullshit when they say it's taken care of, or they're on the pill; pill won't stop your dick from rotting off._

_Never at the motel. What you do elsewhere is mostly your business—so long as it doesn't interfere with the job—but the last thing we need is someone snooping around and seeing stuff that's none of their business._

_We do what we do and we shut up about it. Don't let some girl's golden pussy loosen up your lips just because she fucked or sucked your brains out, okay?_

"Why me?" Dean asks, looking stricken and a little panicky.

"Because you're his big brother and he still worships the ground you walk on," John answers. "Because he'll obey me, but he'll listen to you." John scratches the back of his neck. "He's already had some girl up at the motel. You know how it is, Dean. I don't want things getting messy. Now do it."

"Yes, sir," Dean mutters, going back to moving gravy from one side of his plate to the other with the end of his biscuit.

"What's going on?" Sam asks, coming back to the table and slamming hard into Dean to force him over on the booth bench. Dean shoves right back.

"Oh, nothing," John says blandly and lets them wrestle for a few moments before asking, "So. Sammy. You going to tell us about your new 'friend'?"

Sam chokes on his giant mouthful of mashed potatoes—kid eats like there's no tomorrow and John's got no idea where it's all going—and Dean whacks him helpfully on the back. "Um," he says, picking up his water glass and gulping half of it in one go. "No, sir. I think I'd…um. Rather not. Unless I have to." He looks at Dean pleadingly and John's having the _worst_ time keeping a straight face as Dean covers his brother's back, breaking in with some line of patter about his run-in with a convenience store clerk earlier that day.

John leans back and lets Dean run on, smiling to himself. Mary, he supposes, would be horrified at his cavalier attitude. Or maybe not; Mary had a pretty raunchy streak herself and a wicked sense of humor. She'd probably be the one needling Sam over the next several weeks, quiet jabs that were all the more effective because they were so unexpected from her.

Someday, he thinks to himself. Someday, when this is all over, they'll have that, his boys. A home, a real life, someone who loves them as well or better than they love each other, maybe even grandkids. _Someday_ , he thinks again, and this time it's a promise.

**Three.**

John finally cuts the engine and the silence after the rumble seems very loud, filling up the car until he can hardly breathe through it. Or maybe it's just that he's sensitive, feeling skinned raw just by his presence here, the last place on earth he thought he'd be.

_(…if you go, if you **leave** , don't even think about coming back…)_

He'd left Dean on his own and mourned the days when he could park him at Jim's, just so he could be sure Dean wasn’t getting himself in trouble. Dean's been at loose ends since Sammy left, moping around, drinking too much, catting and fighting too much—not that John's been much better or different. Less sex, more drinking, maybe. Couple fewer fights, but not for lack of trying. Which, he reckons, is the reason he's sitting out here in the first place.

Finally, John sighs, slips the key free from the ignition and gets out. His knees pop like gunshots and his back is tingly with ache; it was a long ride and he hadn't let himself stop longer than it took to fill up, whiz and re-caffeinate, afraid that if he stopped, his damn fool pride would make him turn right the hell around.

He feels it dragging his steps now as he makes his way up the sidewalk to Sam's dorm. Little angry mutters of _'if he wanted to go so damn bad, let him'_ and _if anyone's going to come crawling back, should be him, ungrateful little puke'_ , sounding a lot like his Dad. But that's all bullshit. John can eat a little crow if it means keeping Sammy safe. Mary would've skinned his hide for letting Sam walk out in the first place. John sighs. He bets Mary would have also known how to talk to the sulky, resentful, pigheaded boy. She always knew how to handle him, after all.

 _'I'm sorry.'_ He has to frame the words in his mind because they don't and won't come easy, standing here in front of Sam's door in what feels like cap in hand. From the inside, he can hear the Stones playing a little too loud, almost foreign in crisscrossing signals of electronic thumpa-thumpa and chattering rap. "I'm sorry," he practices again, wondering if Sam'll even take the time to listen. To hear.

He reaches for the knob and starts to knock when his fingers slide across the smooth silken texture of a tie, knotted around the knob. As if to remind him of signals more than a few decades old in his mind, he hears Sam groan at the same time, loud and in that carrying deep voice that's so startling for someone still expecting a chubby eight-year old.

There's no mistaking the noise, even if he wasn't intimately acquainted with its littler, stifled cousin for more years and through more motel rooms than he can count. It doesn't surprise him—after all, isn't that what kids _do_ once they get out to college and on their own?—but he does feel more than a little gut-punched when he hears the answering _male_ moan that follows it, quieter, but still audible over Richards' guitars and Jagger's vocals.

"Hey man, you looking for Sam or Eddie?"

"Sam," John stammers without thinking, too shaken, too blown to be cool. He turns away from the door to face the scrawny kid behind him, fingers still tangled in the tie's cool texture. He holds it out a little, collecting enough of his brain to say wryly, "Think he's a little busy, though."

John lets go of the tie all at once as if it might burn him, as if it's the last tether holding him here and suddenly he feels nothing but full of the desire to flee, to be rid of this place. Is _this_ the reason Sam felt the need to leave? What did he think John was going to do?

"Hey," the boy calls faintly after him. "You want me to tell him you came by?"

John waves a dismissive and absentminded hand. He should have never come here. Sam had made his choice and now they were all going to have to live with it.

(A year later, though, when Phoebe James, another hunter of his acquaintance, stops through Palo Alto and tells him later about Sam and Jess, it doesn't stop him from putting his head down on the truck's steering wheel and whispering a short prayer of thanks. He loves his son and that won't change, but life's hard enough without throwing gay into the mix.)

Dean rolls in a day after John gets back, looking red-eyed with exhaustion and swollen mouthed, covered in hickeys of all shades and sizes. He looks shame-faced and sullen, expecting John to blow up at him but John just puts his arm around Dean's shoulder and says gently, "I put you somewhere, I expect to find you there when I get back, got it?"

"Yes, sir." Dean nods, eyes down.

John pats Dean's arm. "Good man. Things are going to be okay, Dean," he says then. And for a while, they actually are.

**Four.**

"We're going to the bar," Dean says tersely and hangs up before John can say anything. Slowly, John puts the receiver back in the cradle and wonders what this is about now and how much leash he should let the boys have before he reins them back in.

They've been terse, twitchy and irritable since they all met back up and while he expected _some_ flak from the boys about his long absence—especially from Sam—he also expected them to be more enthused about his return and how close they are to closing this whole thing down for good.

But instead, Sam's been sullen and outright _weird_ (which isn't unusual and about what John expected) and Dean's been skittish and irritable (which is _very_ unusual and not at all expected). He never expected Dean to bust out on him like he had, full of a whole head of thunder that's obviously been brewing for a long time.

And then there's the look in Sam's eyes when Dean did it; almost gleeful, because the good Lord knows _he's_ got his list of grievances he's been building up to for years.

So maybe a night out at the bar, drinking and—knowing Dean—chatting up some of the local gals, is just what the doctor ordered. Get out some of that young buck syndrome.

On the other hand, they _are_ within spitting distance of putting paid to this demon cocksucker once and for all and the last thing he needs or wants is for the boys to get sloppy at a time they most need to be on their toes. Just because the clock's started doesn't mean any of this is going to be easy.

Decided, John goes to the door to catch the boys and tell them so. He catches a glimpse of them from the window, though, and the sight's enough to give him pause. Their backs are to him so he can't make out their faces, but Dean's supporting and supporting Sam by an arm around his brother's back and Sam's walking—staggering, really—with a loose, rolling gait that tells John he ain't quite steady on his feet. Dean takes Sam around to the passenger's side and gets him tucked in. Something about it—the movements, the postures—reminds John very much of him and Mary, long ago, especially when she was pregnant with Sam and a little wobble-kneed.

Some of the tension goes out of John's back. Dean circles back around to the driver's side and though it's still hard to make out his expression in the dimness, John thinks he looks preoccupied, which is Dean's way of worrying. Dean gets in and John watches his head turn to say something to Sam. Sam's slumped up against the window, barely visible except for the untidy mop of his hair (which John ought to say something about tomorrow). Dean reaches out and ruffles Sam's hair and John turns away, filled with worry and an uneasy pride.

He hadn't thought quite enough about what Dean would do when he left. Dean's both smart and resourceful, but he's always had a bit of a blind spot about his own skills and he doesn't believe in himself as much as he ought. While John thought turning Dean loose might have taught him some of that sorely needed independence, he feels he should have predicted that Dean would make a beeline straight for Sammy.

Not that he's regretting it, exactly. Obviously, things turned out for the best and neither John nor Sam could have asked for a better protector for Sam than Dean. More than that, the little interplay in the parking lot tells him that what he's prayed for and despaired of all these years—especially while Sam was a angry and defiant teen—has finally come to fruition.

His sons are a unit.

John goes to his bag and fishes out a pint of Jim Beam and the picture of Mary he keeps carefully wrapped in old T-shirts. He sets the picture on the nightstand, where the light is strongest, and unwraps one of the motel-provided cups. Couple of fingers of Jim in the bottom, gleaming gold-brown, and John sits on the too-soft bed's edge and looks into that static, beautiful face.

He thinks he has it memorized, which sometimes comforts him and other times troubles as he worries about losing the sense of the _real_ Mary, as she was, for this unmoving icon. Right now, though, all he feels is tired and strangely elated. The boys are together. The _family's_ together, and very soon, this will all be done and his boys will be safe.

So many boys will be safe.

John tips his glass at the picture. "Our boys, honey," he says to her.

He sips the bourbon slowly and doesn't pour any more. He should go over his research again. He doesn't need to get sloppy any more than the boys. He should trawl through the massive pile of uncollated data and today's papers. But for once, he's content to sit quiet and still, letting the Jim fill him with languid heat that eases aching bones and sore heart. He falls asleep to Mary's face, shining back at him.

**Five.**

John wakes up early. It's always early now, not even the gray of pre-dawn. He doesn't know if it's the product of age or obsession, but it seems lately he always goes to sleep later and wakes earlier. He doesn't feel tired. Or, no more tired than any other time. Honestly, he can't remember the last time he didn't feel tired at all, though he knows there must have been a time. Surely.

His bones creak and his back aches as he sits up. Mary's still smiling from the nightstand and he rubs his thumb lovingly over the wood frame before he bundles it back up and stows it in his bag. He likes to look at her sometimes, but he doesn't need the picture to see her anymore and when the picture's safe in his bag he feels better, like she's protected.

He doesn't like to examine that too deeply.

John goes to the window to check on the boys and sees the Impala's still gone.

It's a little unusual—especially with Sammy along for the ride—but not yet worrisome. It _is_ early.

John strips out of his heavy over-shirt and undershirt and starts his morning stretches. The muscles are slow to respond; he slept badly and in all his clothes. He's not twenty any more. Eventually the muscles _do_ wake up, though, and the ache blends mellowly into the heat of exertion. He rolls into sit-ups, then crunches, then push-ups.

He's ten minutes into his second set when he hears the familiar swaggering rumble of the Impala. John rolls to his feet and goes to the door. The morning air is raw and still bitter with night's cold. John leans against the jamb, arms crossed, and watches the boys climb out of the car. Sam's walking under his own power, though he still looks drawn in on himself, head ducked.

"Hey, Dad," he says, gravel-voiced and his hands bunched up in his jacket pockets.

"Hey, son," John says amiably enough. "You boys just getting in?"

"You know how it is," Dean interjects, coming around the hood. He looks just as tired as before and there's a bite on his neck, purpling up. His eyes are red, but he's still got all his hustle and nervous energy. "You go out, you meet some people, you hit it off…"

"And by people…we're talking girls?" John asks, amused. Dean's little shuck-and-jives are always amusing and the kid knows when to have his head screwed on straight.

"Well, they don't like it much when you call them girls," Dean says in a confiding tone and Sam flinches a little, kicking the gravel.

Interested, John wonders if Sam found a girl—a woman—of his own. He doesn't want to see Sam go through the same kind of mourning he's been through these past couple decades. Sam's Jess had seemed like a nice enough girl and she sure hadn't deserved what happened, but Sam is his son and that means a lot more than some poor girl who just had the misfortune of getting mixed up with the wrong family.

"Yeah, well, I don't need all the dirty details," John says, holding up his hand. "And we need to be hitting the road. Why don't you boys clean up? We'll get some breakfast and get going, yeah?" He claps Sam on the shoulder and ignores it when Sam shuffles aside a little. That's going to take time. And if things go well, maybe they'll have it.

"Yeah," Dean says, and hooks an arm over Sam's shoulders, steering him back towards their room. "Sounds good, sir. Right, Sammy?"

"Yeah." Sam shoves Dean and they lock-step back to the room, tussling and growling like a pair of young dogs. Dean slaps Sam on the ass and Sam shoves Dean into the wall. Dean straightens his jacket with wounded dignity and follows Sam into the room.

Chuckling, John heads back into his own room for his own shower. Boys.


End file.
